Exposure at Dejima: A Tiger Lily Short Story

By K. Bird Lincoln

In this short story set after the events of novels Tiger Lily and The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight, Tiger Lily and her lordling, Ashikaga Yoshinori travel to Dejima Island, the home of foreign doctor, desperate for a cure for Ashikaga's father, the Lord Daimyo's, mysterious illness. But someone else has gotten to the doctor first and Ashikaga will face the choice of saving the Daimyo. or exposing a long-held secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K. Bird Lincoln
• Release date: Dec 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540112941

K. Bird Lincoln

K. Bird Lincoln is an ESL professional and writer living on the windswept Minnesota Prairie with family and a huge addiction to frou-frou coffee. Also dark chocolate-- without which, the world is a howling void. Originally from Cleveland, she has spent more years living on the edges of the Pacific Ocean than in the Midwest. Her speculative short stories are published in various online & paper publications such as Strange Horizons. Her medieval Japanese fantasy series, Tiger Lily, is available from Amazon. World Weaver Press released Dream Eater, the first novel in an exciting, multi-cultural Urban Fantasy trilogy set in Portland and Japan, in 2017. She also writes tasty speculative fiction reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Check her out on Facebook, join her newsletter for chocolate and free stories, or stalk her online at kblincoln.com Tiger Lily: "A beautifully-written genderbending tale of rebellious girls, shifting disguises, and forbidden magic, set against the vivid backdrop of ancient Japan."  --Tina Connolly, author of Ironskin  "DREAM EATER brings much-needed freshness to the urban fantasy genrewith its inspired use of Japanese culture and mythology and its fully-realizedsetting of Portland, Oregon. I'm eager to follow Koi on more adventures!" --Beth Cato, author of The Clockwork Dagger and Breath of Earth

Book preview

Exposure at Dejima

A Tiger Lily story

By K. Bird Lincoln

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I leaned over the side of the dingy and expelled the Portuguese tempura I’d eaten for lunch back in Nagasaki into the deep blue waves of Omura Bay. My lordling coughed. A real Kyoto handmaiden wouldn’t be so indelicate in front of others. Too bad I was only a hick peasant from the North, not accustomed to foreign foods.

Lord Ashikaga patted my hand, eyes fixed on fan-shaped Dejima Island ahead, but the thoughts behind those eyes were probably with Ashikaga’s father, the Lord Daimyo of the Northern Han, now wasting away in Kyoto at Emperor Cho-Kei’s court.

Ashikaga’s father would never return home. My lordling was grasping at straws journeying to see this barbarian doctor.

The barbarian rower mumbled something to their translator, Murase-san, in incomprehensible Dutch. 

Ten more minutes, said Murase-san.

Keeping my lips tightly closed, I focused on the island.

The silky-cold sound of kami voices, their sing-song whisper a welcome caress, sounded faintly across the water.

I straightened up on the bench. From my earliest memory helping Father stir pots in the Ashikaga village’s main house kitchen, the old gods’ voices had spoken to me in quiet moments. My mother secretly left offerings in a hidden Jindo shrine to the kami of a stream near our house in the woods before she disappeared. Since I’d left our home in the North to follow my lordling to the Buddhist stronghold of Kyoto, and banished a ghost haunting his father, for the first time in my life I had endured silence. In his Capital, the Emperor’s interdiction of the old ways banished shelf shrines and garden tori gates.

The familiar buzz of the